Scarred Lives and Scared Souls
by FireSpringRoses
Summary: Sometimes, before mourning over a death, denial of the reality is stronger than reality itself. For most people it is brief. For very few it is a journey to a dark place. The darkest place. A hero went there and he met...  spoilers for all 3 seasons


**This was written a long time ago, during a very emotional period. It is an attempt (one and only!) to accept the end of the series as it is. It is given with a supernatural touch, matching the end of season three. Special thanks to Neftzer for the significantly useful beta.**

Scarred Lives and Scared Souls

_Love grows where nothing else does. It heals what cannot be cured. It rescues what is hopelessly lost. Love is to be savored. Love is to be treasured_.

_Love can be lost in the blink of an eye. Love can be taken away. Pain comes to fill the void. Pain consumes the soul. Pain fights with sanity and wins._

Two times had I lost her.

The first time

What could I do? Who else could I summon to help me? Help her? Minute by minute, I was left behind to watch her slipping away.

"She is dead," I was told. This was the end. It came soon.

I saw an empty life before my eyes. A dead man wandering amongst the living. A living ghost hidden in the shades. A shadow, haunted by his lost love, haunting his enemies.

Then, I ran. Anyone coming to my sight had to die. All of them had to die. She was dead. Why should they live? For her.

"For you, my love."

Once the killing was done, there would be more killing. The man who was shooting arrows during the war had woken up again, and now he was craving for vengeance. That was wrong. I had to stop him. For her.

"For you, my love."

I tried to think rationally of what should be done next. "Prepare her body," I said. "Get her to her father." _Find a way to say goodbye to the beloved woman you'll never see smiling again._ No one of them dared to speak that.

"Her I loved." Where did I find the strength to use past tense? Her I love.

Thoughts and images. Sounds and movements. Nothing real but her still figure.

And then she came back to life, and so did I. "Where have I been?" her voice sang. "I don't know, but I am glad you're back." Her life meant life for me.

The second and final time

"Come on Marian. You promised, my love. You can't leave me now that we've said our vows. Open your eyes and we'll have a proper wedding. Remember how many times you told me that you would fill the church with flowers? Yellow and white roses, my love... I am going to fill the church with roses, but I need you to tell me where to place them, or I'll just do it all wrong.

This is not funny anymore, Marian. You cannot pretend you die every now and then, and scare me like that. Oh, look, now I am crying like a little child. Much is going to laugh at me for crying like that... Talk to him, Marian. Talk to me... Say something, anything. It is cruel, my love, this silence.

Open your eyes, sweetheart. Smile at me. Don't stay motionless. Touch my hand. Look at me, Marian! Laugh or yell, I don't care. Just look at me. Please don't leave me. You cannot leave me!

Come back, my love. There is nothing for you in the dark, where you're heading. I am here and I hold your hand. Come to me. Come, because I cannot follow you. I want to, but I can't. You have to find your way back, Marian..."

Or could I? Could I go with her? Get her back? Undo the irreversible?

I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I found myself in a dark place. The dead of night was getting darker than usual, if that were possible. My eyes couldn't see very well, but I knew which direction to move.

There was music. A sad song. A man was singing with clear and touching voice.

_**Soul on fire, I dared the gods**_

_**My shadow is your guide**_

_**Through the hollow and I came, you pause**_

_**Follow me**_

Suddenly, there was dim light from a torch on the wall. The man was sitting on a rock by the river. We were in a cave. The gate of the underworld, I assumed. There would be no other place as dark as this. An alarming feeling pierced my whole being, but I remained still, determined to see the end of this.

The lyre in his hands was producing the most mesmerizing sound I had ever heard. I tried to speak but there was just the music, echoing in the cave.

He had his eyes closed as if he wanted to keep the world, or at least this appalling part of the world, from his sight.

_**Up the hill, so hard, so hard**_

_**To keep you from my eyes**_

_**Have to turn around and see your face**_

_**Follow me**_

My pain was in his voice.

_**Come star of dawn**_

_**Come fall of night  
**_

_**Come follow me**_

He had lost his love too. He must have wanted to get her back. Did he try? Did he succeed?

_**I follow you through a broken dream  
**_

_**I've set my sail  
**_

_**So hard to wait  
**_

_**To see your face  
**_

_**Though I've been warned "never turn around"**_

How long had he been down there, singing for his lover?

"Who are you? Why are you here?" I asked when the song was over.

"My name is cursed but if you want to hear it, here it is; Orpheus. As to why I am here, where else could I be? A dead man's immortal soul belongs nowhere but here. The question is why you are here. From what I know, and I know well, you're not dead," he responded and played some chords on his lyre.

How could he knew whether I was dead or not? And the name. I knew I had heard that name before, but I couldn't place it right in my mind. I wouldn't ponder on this, though. "I am…"

"I know who you are, Robin. **Why** are you here, hero of the poor?"

He know who I was? That was impossible. "How do you know who I am?"

I saw him smiling, although it wasn't an ordinary smile. There was no intention or desire to smile. Just a weak facial response to what I had said. "Let's just say that down here, I have met a few people who speak very fondly of you."

"Who? Have you seen my...?"

"You are asking questions that you're not meant to receive the answers to. Tell me why are you here."

Apparently, I would get no easy answers from him. "I came to find the woman I love," I informed him.

"I see." He nodded and then continued, "leave as you came. There is nothing for you here."

My wife had just died and he said that there was nothing in the underworld for me? "She is," I told him and hoped that he wouldn't dare to repeat that. There was little that my aching heart could take.

"You think you can succeed where I have failed? How I wish. I wish one of those who had tried..." Then he vanished from my eyes.

"Wait!" I yelled to every direction he might had gone to.

As unexpectedly as he had left, he came back. "I cannot stay on this side of the river anymore. I need to go. And so must you. Leave." His pitying look stabbed my heart. Now he was like a ghost or a vision, flying over the river.

"Please help me!"

I blinked twice and he was no ghost anymore. He was, if the word would fit, a proper man again; Just like when I first saw him a few minutes ago. He stopped in front of me, his eyes were locked in mine and I could see his anger.

"You were standing here long enough to listen the whole story. Do I really have to spell it for you?"

Then I remembered. _Though I've been warned "never turn around"_. "I won't turn around, whatever that means," I screamed. I had no idea what this was about, but if there was anything I could do to get Marian back how did he expect me not to try it?

"You have no idea what you are asking," he said angrily. The way he uttered those words upset me.

"You must help me," I begged, not paying attention to all the signs telling me the opposite.

The brashness in his tone was gone. "This is my help. My advice. Leave while you still can," his firm voice warned me again, but in vain.

"I will stop trying only with my last breath. And my last breath will be for her. Calling her name. I am not giving up."

He scoffed. "You, my friend, you don't love your wife more than I do mine."

I was expecting the next thing he would say to stop me, ready to give him a reply, to prove that I had made up my mind.

"You want to get to the other side, but the ferryman isn't here for you. Keep your coin, my friend. It isn't your time to travel across Acheron. It is a mistake to insist. This is a trap."

I knew traps. I was good at surviving. One chance was all I wanted.

He rolled his eyes when he saw me unwilling to take his advice. "Rumor proved true! You are stubborn. Listen then, and learn from my mistake." He looked at me intently. The intimidating wisdom of experience was hidden in that look.

"I managed to persuade Hades and his wife to give me another chance with my dear love," he continued, "I could bring her back to the world of the living with one condition. Only one. I could look at her only after we both would be on the face of the Earth... At the end, I was weaker than I should be, like everybody else."

That man didn't seem weak, but defeated. Any man who had tried so hard couldn't be weak.

"Leave, and when the time comes, you will see her again. When your days with the living will be over, your soul will find its way here. Not a day sooner. If you are lucky, your lover will accompany you on your last journey."

"Did you find her? After your death?" I asked him. If I had to wait, there had to be something worth waiting for.

He nodded, but remained silent.

"Then why are you here, singing for her as if she lost?" Nothing about that man made sense.

"Because I could have had a real life with my beloved, before spending the eternity with her here. I could have lived with her. But I didn't. The reason I come here is because the pain and the guilt of my failure never left me. And here, she cannot hear me crying..."

Tears ran form his dark, eyes and he looked at me in sorrow.

"Don't seek for other solutions, hero. If there were such, I would know..."

I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I saw my friends staring at me.

Was that a dream? A memory? Had I really been at the gate of the underworld? The only sure thing was that now I was back to where I didn't want to be. In a world that wouldn't have its brightest star. Her. _Star of dawn..._

My mind was trapped between the doleful reality and the false hope that I could escape it.

My eyes, dried of life, looking at them as the faint light of hope was vanishing with every heartbeat I had and she hadn't.

That was all of me: pain and anger.

_She is gone and I have to keep living without her_. The same phrase repeated in my mind. Every blurry dawn after every sleepless night. Every gloomy night when another day had 'died'.

The pain never left; constant companion through my days and mostly through the nights.

The anger was coming and going without notice. Crushing on me like a wave, due to a sudden wind crushes on the rocks in the sea.

_She is gone._

The end

I lived my days, doing what I had promised her. Fighting injustice, protecting the weak, believing that there was goodness in the world even if it rarely showed itself to me. It was her wish and my need. I started without her. For a long time I had hoped that we would see better days together. That was not what happened...

_We have forever my love_; this was our comfort.

Now, I was dying. I was thinking of what the singer had told me in that fading memory or very real dream; "_When the time comes you will see her again_."

The forest, my forest, was beautiful. So serene and alive. So full of light. The place I called home. A happy farewell for me. I wanted to be alone, and my friends respected that. There was this 'little voice' telling me that she would come, and she did.

Waiting was over.

Dressed like an angel. Radiant, gorgeous, exquisite. My wife.

"I knew I'd find you again!"

"It is time," she said and took my hand, never to leave me again.

The path was dark, as I remembered it. The music called us.

"Orpheus," she whispered with sympathy for the troubadour.

He was singing his love song. Alone, with his pain. Until the moment the would go back to his wife. A never ending grief.

I wasn't like him. Having my love with me was what I wanted. Earth or Heaven. Life or afterlife, made no difference. Life with her on Earth was like Heaven, anyway.

"Now and forever?" I asked her.

"Now and forever!" she promised me.

"Then let forever begin now!"

* * *

**The myth of Orpheus has been an inspiration for songs (like the one used here. Composed by Manos Hadjidakis and lyrics by Dorian Rudnytsky), theatrical plays, paintings etc. It is one of the most famous and tragic love stories.**


End file.
